Go to Martin’s project page, and you’ll see his written examples, and there is an Excel file to download. Martin has done an in-depth study of what’s allowed, beyond the basic letters and numbers. What is allowed, and what isn’t?Īn link in an old Excel newsgroup post led me to a treasure trove of information on rules for Excel names – Martin Trummer’s GitHub project on excel-names. Testing the Rules for Excel NamesĪfter looking at Peter’s examples, and doing a few experiments, I did some searching, so see what documentation there might be online, for these anomalies. You can see a couple of those in the screen shot above. However, when I created a couple of names in the Name Manager, the special characters show up correctly there, but appear as question marks in the Name Box drop down list. In the screen shot below, you can see that name in the Name Box drop down list, along with a few other unconventional names that I created.Įxcel used the characters from cell D2, when I created a name using the “Create From Selection technique on that range. That means “a happy faces goes up and down”, in case you were wondering. For example, I typed an “a” in the Name Box, then Alt+1, Alt+30 and Alt+31. Inspired by Peter’s examples, I did a few simple name tests, using characters from the “Alt and Number Keypad” set. I learned about “beyond the basics” technique from Peter B., who sent me a workbook in which he used Unicode text in his Excel names (shown below). It seems that “letters” has a broad interpretation. NOTE: You can see the step in the video at the end of this article.Įven though Microsoft’s rules for Excel names say that you must use only letters, numbers, periods, underscores and backslashes, other characters are allowed. Since Excel creates the names in this method, you don’t have to worry about what’s valid. Excel names the ranges with valid names, based on your headings.Check the box to tell Excel where your headings are (top, left, bottom or right), and click OK.Then, on Excel’s Formulas tab, click the Create From Selection command.First, select the heading cell, and the cells that you want to name.For example, type “Months”, then the month names in the 12 cells below that. Quick NamesĪnother easy way to create names is based on text that you’re already entered on the worksheet. Later, you can use those names in formulas, or for navigation. If you forget that step, the name doesn’t stick. Type a valid one-word name for those cells, in the Name Box at the left of the Formula Bar.It’s easy to name a range of cells – here’s what I usually do (there’s a video at the end of this article too): For example, North and NORTH are treated as the same name. C, c, R, r - can’t be used as names - Excel uses them as selection shortcuts.Names can’t look like cell addresses, such as A$35 or R2D2.Space characters are not allowed as part of a name.Remaining characters in the name can be.The first character of a name must be one of the following characters:.It seems clear, but a few of the rules aren’t as ironclad as they look: There are rules for Excel Names, and here’s what Microsoft says is allowed. After you create Excel names, you can use them in formulas, or quickly go to a named range. In Excel, you can create names that refer to cells, or to a constant value, or a formula. There are special rules for Excel names, but you might be surprised to see what is allowed. As Juliet famously said to Romeo, “What’s in a name?” And she was talking about rows (misspelled as “rose”), so maybe Juliet was using a spreadsheet at the time.
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